Julia Roberts, in full Julia Fiona Roberts, (born October 28, 1967, Smyrna, Georgia, U.S.), American actress whose deft performances in varied roles helped make her one of the highest-paid and most-influential actresses in the 1990s and early 2000s.

  Although Roberts’s parents briefly ran an actors’ workshop when she was a child, she had no acting experience or formal training when she moved to New York City after high school to pursue a career in show business. She signed with a modeling agency upon her arrival but failed to land any jobs. Her first film role turned up after she was recommended by her older brother, actor Eric Roberts, for a bit part as his on-screen sister in Blood Red (1989), a drama set in the late 1800s; although the film was completed in 1986, its release was delayed for several years. She next made several television appearances before securing her first leading part, in Mystic Pizza (1988).

 Roberts’s career took off after she was cast in Steel Magnolias (1989), which featured such veteran actresses as Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, and Sally Field. Roberts received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress for her heartrending portrayal of Field’s diabetic daughter. In 1990 she starred in Pretty Woman, an upbeat comedy about a romance between a prostitute and a business tycoon, played by Richard Gere. A huge hit, it made Roberts a household name and earned her a second Academy Award nomination.

  Roberts continued to work steadily throughout the 1990s, starring in Flatliners (1990), Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), The Pelican Brief (1993), Something to Talk About (1995), Mary Reilly (1996), My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), and Stepmom (1998), for which she also served as executive producer. Her personal life at times overshadowed her professional career, however, as when her highly publicized marriage to singer Lyle Lovett abruptly ended in 1995. In 1999 Roberts starred in two popular romantic comedies, Notting Hill and Runaway Bride, the latter of which again paired her with Gere.

  In 2000 Roberts launched her own production company, Shoelace Productions, and that same year she commanded $20 million for her starring role in Erin Brockovich. The film portrayed the real-life story of a law-office clerk who helped the citizens of a California town win a multimillion-dollar settlement against a utility company for health problems caused by the company’s pollution of their drinking water. For her performance, Roberts won an Academy Award for best actress. She later starred opposite Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Matt Damon in the blockbuster comedy Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and its sequel Ocean’s Twelve (2004). She also appeared in the relationship drama Closer (2004).

  In 2006 Roberts supplied the voice for the spider Charlotte in the animated film adaptation of E.B. White’s beloved children’s book Charlotte’s Web. That year she made her Broadway debut in Three Days of Rain, earning mixed reviews. Roberts next appeared with Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), a film based on true events surrounding the U.S. government’s involvement in the Afghan resistance to the Soviets in the 1980s. Her subsequent movies included the family drama Fireflies in the Garden (2008); Duplicity (2009), in which she played a corporate spy; and the romantic comedy Valentine’s Day (2010).

   After starring in Eat Pray Love (2010), which was adapted from Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir of the same name, Roberts, playing a community-college professor, reteamed with Hanks in Larry Crowne (2011). In Mirror Mirror (2012), a comedic version of the Snow White tale, she inhabited the role of the evil queen. She then crossed swords with Meryl Streep—who played her savagely critical mother—in the family drama August: Osage County (2013), based on the play by Tracy Letts; the role earned Roberts an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. She later assumed the role of a doctor assisting gay men during the early years of the AIDS crisis in New York City in The Normal Heart (2014), a television adaptation of Larry Kramer’s play.

   In the feature film Secret in Their Eyes (2015), Roberts portrayed an FBI agent whose daughter is raped and murdered. She then joined the cast of the ensemble comedy Mother’s Day (2016) as a hard-driving businesswoman. In Jodie Foster’s Wall Street thriller Money Monster (2016), Roberts’s character is the producer of a financial advice show who is taken hostage along with the host (Clooney) and their crew. In 2017 Roberts lent her voice to the animated film Smurfs: The Lost Village and played the mother of a child with a rare facial condition in Wonder. The following year she starred as a therapist working at a facility to help veterans adjust to civilian life in Homecoming, her first television series, and as a mother whose son skips his rehabilitation program to return home for Christmas in Ben Is Back. Roberts then appeared in the TV miniseries Gaslit (2022), a drama centring on Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, and the attempts to discredit her as she sought to reveal the truth about the Watergate scandal.

   Throughout her career, Roberts lent her support to numerous charitable organizations, including UNICEF and the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. In order to raise awareness for threatened species of wildlife, she narrated the documentary In the Wild: Orangutans with Julia Roberts (1998), and for Wild Horses of Mongolia (2000) she lived with Mongolian nomads for several weeks; both programs appeared on American television.

Julia Roberts Turned Down Rom-Coms for 20 Years Because a Good Script ‘Didn’t Exist’.

   When the Julia Roberts and George Clooney-starring “Ticket to Paradise” opens in theaters later this year, it will mark Roberts’ first time leading a romantic comedy in more than 20 years. The genre made Roberts a global superstar in the 1990s, from her Oscar-nominated performance in “Pretty Women” to rom-com classics “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “Notting Hill,” among others. One would have to go all the way back to 2001’s “America’s Sweethearts” for the last traditional rom-com led by Roberts (she had small roles in the ensemble rom-coms “Valentine’s Day” and “Mother’s Day,” plus turns in romance dramas like “Eat Pray Love” and romance crime movies such as “Duplicity”).

   Why the two-decade wait for another Roberts rom-com? As the actor recently told The New York Times, she wasn’t purposefully avoiding the genre that made her a superstar. Quite the contrary. Roberts said her extended hiatus from the rom-com genre was not her choice, but a result of the lack of an adequate script or idea.

    “People sometimes misconstrue the amount of time that’s gone by that I haven’t done a romantic comedy as my not wanting to do one,” Roberts said. “If I had read something that I thought was that ‘Notting Hill’ level of writing or ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ level of madcap fun, I would do it. They didn’t exist until this movie that I just did that Ol Parker wrote and directed.”

    The Ol Parker film is “Ticket to Paradise,” which pairs Roberts opposite longtime friend and collaborator Clooney. The movie almost became yet another one of Roberts’ rejected rom-coms because she thought it would only work well opposite Clooney. This was before Clooney came on board.

    “Lo and behold, George felt it only worked with me. Somehow we were both able to do it, and off we went,” Roberts said about returning to the genre.

   When asked  if she stayed away from romantic comedies for 20 years because “there wasn’t a single good script, not one,” Roberts answered, “Yeah.”

     “Here’s the thing: If I’d thought something was good enough, I would have done it,” Roberts said. “But I also had three kids in the last 18 years. That raises the bar even more because then it’s not only ‘Is this material good?’ It’s also the math equation of my husband’s work schedule and the kids’ school schedule and summer vacation. It’s not just, ‘Oh, I think I want to do this.’ I have a sense of great pride in being home with my family and considering myself a homemaker.”

     Roberts added, “As they get older, and particularly with my daughter, I do have a sense of responsibility for showing my children that I can be creative and that it’s meaningful to me — so meaningful that for periods of time I will choose to focus on that almost more than my family, which has been hard for me to come to terms with.”

     One of the biggest rumors to emerge out of Roberts’ tenure as a rom-com icon was that her trademark smile was insured for $30 million. The Oscar winner shut down that speculation in her New York Times interview, saying, “No. What am I insuring it against? How would you do that? … I mean, if my smile was insured, there would be someone at my house on a nightly basis saying, ‘You need to floss longer.'”